Symphony.

I actively seek out Freelance work, and more often than not I am forced to filter out Wordpress, and Joomla. Now I used to use Wordpress, and it was it’s clunkyness that forced me to check out Symphony. But Joomla, never used it, and not sure if I really want to confuse matters by sharing my knowledge across two CMS’s.

I like Symphony, I’m comfortable in it’s interface and would rather strive to attain a master of one instead of a Jack of all. But that’s just my theory.

One thing I never ever see on any of the Freelance sites is Symphony developer required. Why not? Why are people not interested? Is it because clients are not aware of it, and have heard Joomla and think, well we need to have a Joomla site - without really thinking if Joomla is right for them, or whether or not it is as good as it’s reputation.

What can we do to get the Symphony word out there?

Have you ever seen ‘xslt experience required’? It’s just not as popular.

Does it matter? Does the client need an xslt developer or a php developer? I would like to think that a client would want an end result without really giving two hoots on how the developer got there.

I think whey the client requires Joomla developer its because he already has a working site made with Joomla and just needs to add some custom functionality but does not want to rewrite the whole site.

It’s a marketed buzzword, that’s the only reason for it. Joomla itself is terrible.

@Mr_Smith - I don’t agree with you there. I reckon a client has heard about Joomla and has asked for it specifically because like @Buzzomatic says, it’s a buzzword.

I would say a client is more likely to know what Joomla is over Symphony, as they are also more likely to be a Windows Vista user instead of a Leopard user. Nothing to do with whether or not the product can benefit them, but because they have heard about it and have followed the rest of the sheep.

There are 2 possibilities: 1 - a client already has working website and needs to add some extra widget to it.

2 - client does not have a website and need to have one. If that’s the case then you can convince the client that Joomla is not really good.

Well I’m not going to contact them, I’m just putting it out there to the community, and perhaps spark of some kind of promotional drive.

One thing I never ever see on any of the Freelance sites is Symphony developer required. Why not? Why are people not interested?

Most likely because Symphony doesn’t have the same penetration, or marketing budget. Freelancers with Symphony expertise (who aren’t active community members) do exist.

I’ve said this before, but if a client already has technical decisions made for you, you’re in for a struggle. I’d be wary of a client that didn’t trust my professional judgment.

What can we do to get the Symphony word out there?

Blog about it, Twitter about it, and tell everyone you know.

Go to a local meetup (Refresh group, Multipack etc.) and evangelise.

Symphony uses Web Standards through and through (HTML, CSS, XML, XSLT) so perhaps the Web Standards Group and its members (of which many of us probably are already) would be interested.

Refresh groups and WSG both have active mailinglist communities.

Represent Symphony on developer communities such as Collabfinder — Fazal’s comment on that thread should be enough motivation!

Mention Symphony in places where you may not expect to find it.

Build a re-usable set of XSLT template pages for a small website (home page, image gallery, contact page) and target local small businesses. Symphony lets you build a CMS-ed website quickly.

Join the Symphony LinkedIn group.

Bookmark the Symphony site using Delicious and Digg.

How about targeting the XSLT community? I learn so much from Dmitry Kirasov and Jeni Tennison’s posts on the mailinglists I would imagine XSLT developers looking to build websites would see Symphony as a natural fit.

Write a book — Packt welcome submissions from the geek community (there are books on jQuery, Wordpres, Joomla etc).

A high-profile Smashing Magazine blog post would do wonders ;-)

Thanks for this, NickToye. Open question: what should promotion for Symphony look like?

Edit: Nick Dunn has once again anticipated my question. Anyone else?

Smashing Magazine blog post? Ha! To them it ain’t on the intertubes unless it uses Wordpress or jQuery. I’d be surprised if they give us a second glance.

I’ve had snippets published in various Web print magazines (Practical Web Design projects, .net mag) so this would be a good place too. It’s not too difficult to get 400 well chosen words into their pages, although it needs an angle. “Web Standards”, or the transferable skillset of XSLT would be good candidates.

Hi! I love Joomla. Im like because it plugins for everything like poll. for example: “you like to eat a dinner?” and possible answer “a: im like goat. b: im dont like goat. c:im eat same food as goat”

Maybe, we can open some ideas? Im think joomla easy because people can dont need php so much and people has made many plugin and template so easy for establish a fast website for cheap.

im think maybe soon symphony can be do it too as some lots of masters has be make some plugin (extenson) in recent times.

ah…here is some reason why people can has be chosen joomla.

http://www.noupe.com/php/choosing-cms-tips.html

but im no so happy, some people are crazy. you now? see, they miss symphony. for reason why, maybe i dont no.

Some people like CakePHP I hate all of them, but especially Drupal

Funny how the author of that ‘choosing-cms-tips’ article says “it must have WYSIWYG editor.

She may as well say “It must have round corners”

The first step in developing a website is figuring out how it should be structured and how it should work. It’s the most important part (in my opinion) and, often, the most difficult.

A CMS like Joomla makes lots of people happy because it takes this task out of their hands. Everything is plug-and-play, and things live where the system says they should live. No thinking required.

For serious developers and designers, this type of system becomes frustrating very quickly. We crave flexibility, so we can be more creative and solve our many unique problems… That’s why we were all so happy to have found Symphony ;) But it’s also perhaps the reason Symphony faces a bit of a steeper climb than some other CMSes in terms of popularization. Because it challenges you to do difficult work: to think before you build.

Why Joomla? I don’t use it but from what I’ve seen:

• It’s been around forever (as Mambo)
• Has a ton of pre-existing modules/components
• has a ton of themes
• Large installed base = large community = lots of learning resources out there

None of that has to do with inherent quality; it’s just momentum. If I had to pin it down to one thing, I would say it’s the 3rd party development. You can work your way down a laundry list of required functionality and find download links and live demos for most of it. How easy the those functions are to implement, I don’t know.

The nature of Symphony is such that you don’t get quite the instant gratification, you need to put any extension into the context of your site. While we can pat ourselves on the back about why that is (total model & view flexibility, etc.) I think it keeps the lazier (or just hurried) developer/designers away.

Even at the agency where I work, Symphony is a hard sell. Several factors come into play:

• Open source
• Longevity of the project
• Community engagement
• Out-of-the-box functionality
• Flexibility of the templating system

In terms of open source and longevity, Symphony was first released as open source with the release of Symphony 2 Beta Revision 5 in February 2008. Not a whole lot was made of the fact that it was open source at the time, so it’s likely that the knowledge of this fact did not go much further than the beta testers.

It was only with the official release of Symphony 2.0 in December 2008 that the general public has been aware of Symphony as an open source project. So, Symphony is very young as an open source project.

Reviews of Symphony as a CMS usually fall short in the areas of documentation and out-of-the-box functionality. So, I’m hoping that the strategy of building a library of tutorials and ensembles will help to prove that Symphony is a viable contender in the world of content management systems.

Also, it will be great to see what the dev team has in store, as they have expressed intentions of releasing some ensembles.

Out-of-the-box functionality

That to me is the reason.

There are areas of the core that are left out. Be interesting to see what elements are included with Expression Engine’s basic package, and see how many them are in with the Symphony package.

I know there are developers developing extensions etc…. I don’t know, but is it easier to create extensions, then bake them into the core code?